When new technologies emerge, hype often surrounds them. This hype can make it hard to know what they truly make possible, what they could be useful for and what their impacts— both positive of harmful — could be. Below are a set of questions that we should ask frequently when…

To decide what technology we want in our systems and structures, we need clear-eyed conversations about what is possible. Here, I look at how inconsistent — and unrealistic — our ideas of ‘what is possible’ can be, who benefits from overblown assumptions of ‘groundbreaking’ tech, the challenges this brings and…

A while back, I published an exploratory post about the gaps in process and approaches to ethical decision-making in technical production. Fast forward, and I’ve had the good fortune of working with several companies to stress test ideas and have sharpened offerings with the guidance of ethicists, engineers, policy experts…

The digital world is disorienting. It permeates every aspect of our lives, but few of us understand how it works. Worse yet, few of us know where to begin if we want to make it work for us. We…

Faster is Different ‘Faster is different’. Zeynep Tufecki made this point in 2011, to push back on commentators claiming that the digitisation of the public sphere wasn’t materially different. It was ‘only’ accelerating existing dynamics. As the rate of change in technology dramatically accelerates, we see a corollary acceleration in the speed with…